Technical Writing

When having a conversation with someone for the first time, I always love to see his/her face when talking about my job. When I see a gaze of perplexity (which is quite common) I use to put it simply: I write instructions to help people learn how to use something.

Yes, I know, this may be an inaccurate description of my everyday activities, but it works. A usual reaction is:

– Oh, I see! You write these instructions nobody really cares about until something doesn’t work anymore or they can’t figure out by themselves what to do next.

– Well, actually, the right way to go would be to read the documentation before…Anyway, now you know what I do 🙂

Joking aside, to me technical writing means much more. When I write, my main goal is to help people find solutions to problems. I don’t mean to teach anybody (although I love teaching) but to help them fix what’s wrong or just show them how to use something they need in a clear and concise way.

What I really love from technical writing is the “how”. How to get the necessary information from developers, understand and organize it, how to write good examples to improve understanding, how to create supporting graphics, how to understand the customer needs and provide the type of information they really want…and of course how to translate the English text into other languages for an audience with a very different background. That’s challenging but also a lot of fun!